Single Rating System Research Articles

Applying the Association of Australasian Acoustical Consultants (AAAC) guideline for acoustic assessment of gymnasiums and exercise facilities to field measured heavy hard impact data.

In this paper we apply the newly published Association of Australasian Acoustical Consultants (AAAC) Guideline for Acoustic Assessment of Gymnasiums and Exercise Facilities to field measured heavy hard impact data. ISO and ASTM have working groups developing standards with regards to heavy, hard impact noise. There is an industry need for a single number rating or other evaluation system "to assess the noise and vibration impact resulting from the use and operation of both existing and proposed gymnasiums and exercise facilities consistently, accurately and fairly." Lmax sound pressure levels resulting from 22.7 kg weight drops from 150 mm height were collected in a concrete building on numerous gym flooring build ups in two different adjacencies. AAAC guidelines are applied, and single number ratings reported. The AAAC metric is compared to other existing guidelines and metrics. This brings to light the need for a comprehensive ASTM guideline for assessing structure borne noise associated with fitness areas in mixed use buildings.

Applying Analytical Hierarchy Process to Evaluate Adult Occupant Protection on Body Region in ASEAN NCAP Offset Frontal Test Domain


 
 
 Adult Occupant Protection (AOP) is a vital area of evaluation in all New Car Assessment Programs (NCAPs) around the globe. The primary objective of these new car assessment programs is to reduce road deaths by focusing on vehicle (pre-crash) safety features. Starting from the year 2017 until 2020, a single rating system has been introduced whereby AOP contributes 50% to the overall rating with a maximum of 36 points; split into three main domains including offset frontal test (OFT), side impact test (SIT) and head protection technology (HPT). However, the extent of OFT protection to car drivers and passengers during a collision still needs to be explored. Therefore, in this study, an evaluation of body region injury due to AOP failure in frontal crash is conducted to validate and support NCAP rating. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is put forward on the basis of expert's input from various related fields to evaluate the injury to body regions and OFT protection during an accident based on the current situation. The results show that head, neck and chest indicated the highest severity, followed by knee, femur and lower leg with respect to the Consistency Ratio (CR) of 0.0633. This was in line with the focus of ASEAN NCAP's AOP protocol whereby the three body regions were deemed as the critical parts and required sufficient protection. Based on the findings, it is proven that ASEAN NCAP's consideration of OFT in AOP is well developed and suits the current needs.
 
 

Promotion, Performance Rating Granularity, and Decision Spillover Effects

We examine how managers’ consideration of a future promotion decision can influence their subjective evaluation of workers’ past job performance as well as their subsequent promotion decision. We predict that whether such effects manifest depends on the rating granularity (i.e., the number of ratings managers assign to workers) of the performance evaluation system. In our experimental setting, managers first evaluate workers’ past performance and then decide to promote either the worker best at the current job or the worker best suited for promotion. Results indicate that managers evaluate the worker best suited for promotion most favorably under a single-rating system when managers anticipate making a future promotion decision. This in turn increases managers’ likelihood of promoting that worker later, thereby effectively sorting workers to their jobs and mitigating the Peter Principle problem. Our study informs practice of the environmental factors and motivations that influence managers’ subjective evaluations and promotion decisions.

VIOLATION OF INFORMATION ECOLOGY IN MEDIA SPACE

The extreme “pollution” of the global information space has a negative impact on the social well-being of the population for media space is a kind of social space covered by the media. It is necessary to create an effective system of legal protection and social guarantees so that any citizen can receive minimal social protection and be protected from the negative impact of the adverse ecology of the mass media. Not everyone who is experiencing intense exposure to the media is aware of its negative effects including “fatigue syndrome”. To prevent it, D. Lewis proposes the following algorithm: use all information technologies of business and everyday communication; improve the methods of studying and processing data; set the right priorities for their analysis and use [26]. All media and actors that interact with them must master information culture, for which it is necessary to train specialists in the field of media ecology who are aware of the influence of media and social technologies on people’s feelings, thoughts, values and behavior. So far, experts on media ecology do not have a sufficient theoretical basis for conducting sociological research and identifying how the media forces the audience to structure what it sees, hears and feels in a certain way. Today’s media (especially electronic) can have a violent and undesirable effect - this is not only a psychological but also a philosophical, social and cultural problem that affects both children and adults. “Information anarchy” leads not only to moderate negative consequences but in some cases to “information ecocide” - destruction of traditional information and the media. Countering the contamination of the information environment should include the following steps: development of requirements for the content creation; monitoring of the collection, storage, processing and destruction of information; development of criteria for assessing the use of information. It is necessary to introduce a single rating system for information products, which will allow users to evaluate the quality of information sources according to the following criteria: purity of information; work on creating content; source coverage; quality (completeness) of information; sources of specific data sets; social-demographic characteristics of potential users.

A Novel Approach to Personalized Recommender Systems Based on Multi Criteria Ratings

In today's market-driven world whenever the choices have to be made while buying products, we rely on recommendations from people either through word of mouth, recommendation letters, previews or reviews in the newspapers or feedback provided by other customers and surveys made on different products, etc. We live in an age of information technology with a surfeit of information to be made use of effectively. This has inevitably, led to an information overload problem which in turn has created a clear demand for automated methods which will help users locate and retrieve information with respect to their personal preferences in the best and optimal manner; resulting in the development of the Recommender System. Most of the recommender systems are model-based and use Pearson Correlation or Cosine Similarity to find the users who share the same preferences and interests. In this study, we propose two approaches which integrate the concept of multi criteria ratings into the recommender system. The results show that our approach is better than the single traditional rating system.

Method for Assessing Bus Delay in Mixed Traffic to Identify Transit Priority Improvement Locations in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Urban transit services face a number of challenges from space constraints, congestion, and delays, among other issues. Implementing bus priority at traffic signals or providing exclusive operating space for buses can increase the attractiveness of taking the bus and thereby encourage ridership. The City of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was looking to pilot such interventions to demonstrate benefits of bus ridership, but needed a prioritized list of route segments with the largest levels of excess travel time to do so. Three metrics were used to evaluate delay: vehicle delay, overall passenger delay, and system reliability. These three metrics were combined into a single composite rating system for each segment and used to identify route segments along which buses experienced the most delay. The City of Cambridge analyzed high-ridership bus routes with automatic passenger counter data to identify segments along the route where buses experienced substantial delay. The next step for this project is to conduct an on-site field visit of targeted segments to develop potential bus prioritization proposals for each. This paper outlines the method developed to calculate bus delay by segment and presents results for one route analyzed.

Rating and Classification Instruments for Addiction Prevention Measures: Current Status and Future Challenges

Given the growing number of addiction prevention projects – which are partly of disputable quality – it is becoming increasingly difficult for stakeholders to assess the quality of these programmes and to select adequate measures. Thus, recommendations based on quality assessment are urgently needed. This article presents 4 instruments available for the rating or evaluative classification of German addiction prevention programmes. These instruments reflect the current state of the discussion on evidence based addiction prevention. Whereas all instruments allow for a multidimensional rating of prevention measures, the extent to which the quality of the research design, the effects of the intervention, the quality of the concept and the implementation as well as the acceptance among practitioners and target groups is taken into account differs considerably. In order to ensure the quality of addiction prevention, a single rating system should be developed which integrates the advantages and overcomes the disadvantages of the existing instruments.

A proposal for a more refined single number rating system for hearing protector attenuation specification

From a study of recent hearing protector attenuation test data, this work presents a proposal to reconsider how data, gathered by recognized standard subjective test procedures, is used to calculate the single number performance rating of hearing protectors. Current practice is to embed the expected performance (mean) and the variation in performance (standard deviation) in a single rating figure. A proposal is made for clearly separating expected performance from the variation while retaining the use of the current subjective test procedures. This proposal is applicable to all current single number rating systems including SNR, NRR, SLC(80), and the newer ANSI NRS(Ax).

Sustainable Rating Systems in Buildings: An Overview and Gap Analysis

Nowadays environmental issues are of the main role and concern in businesses worldwide. In order to concentrate on environmental and sustainability matters in the building industry, sustainable rating systems are developed globally and buildings are assessed and certificated due to different parameters. In this paper, three widely-used rating systems from three continents; America, Europe and Australia are introduced and a comparison on their assessment categories is presented. By developing a criteria-map, 11 categories are identified and a gap analysis is performed. Results show that no single rating system covers every 11 category. Finally, recommendations are presented to lead to a comprehensive solution and the implications of the acceptance of the solution are discussed. About 40% of the energy is consumed in the building industry (3) and in United States in 2005, buildings were responsible for 38.9% of the total U.S. energy consumption and residential buildings were responsible for about 54% of

Stress before Consumption: A Proposal to Reform Agency Ratings*

AbstractThe financial turmoil starting in late 2007 has engendered serious criticisms of major credit rating agencies (CRAs), crystallising in a groundbreaking Regulation on CRAs in the EU. This article considers that the Regulation might have failed to take into account a fundamental problem relating to credit ratings—the single, through‐the‐cycle rating system—which probably contributed to the ratings of entities highly sensitive to changes in overall market conditions, including banks and financial institutions, to be vulnerable to cascading ratings downgrades during downturns. The first part of the article analyses the performance of such credit ratings to support the above argument, while the second part explores a proposed solution of moving away from the single rating system to one where ‘standard’ ratings are supplemented by ‘stressed ratings.’ This solution can be based on a public–private partnership where CRAs produce stressed ratings based on scenarios set by regulators—an idea that entails recognition that regulatory efforts in this area ultimately entails a complex balancing of the roles of both the CRAs and regulators as gatekeepers in making safety‐and‐soundness judgements together for global financial markets.

Accounting journals and the ABS quality ratings

This study aims to look behind the quality ratings for accounting journals, listed in the ABS Academic Journal Quality Guide ( Kelly, Morris, Rowlinson and Harvey, 2009). Significant variations exist in the perceptions of journal quality across the six UK business schools that contribute ratings to the ABS guide, with the most optimistic perceptions tending to come from those schools whose ratings are more highly correlated with quality scores for critical and interpretive research, as reported in Lowe and Locke's (2005) article in Accounting, Organizations and Society (30:1, 81–98). Pessimistic perceptions are more likely to exist in those schools whose ratings are more highly correlated with Lowe & Locke's scores for functional and capital markets research paradigms. There are also notable variations in journal ratings across time. Given that perceptions vary so much across schools, paradigms and time, how much credence can be given to any single rating system for journal quality? This study concludes that if the ABS guide is to be used by university decision-makers or heads of school then the ABS ratings for any given year need to be treated with extreme caution and with an appropriate recognition of their intrinsic limitations.

The N number, a speech privacy metric for rating walls, revisited

In 1962, Cavanaugh, et al., published the results of research which lead to a single number rating system for speech privacy of walls referred to as the N number [‘‘Speech Privacy in Buildings,’’ J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 34, 475–492 (1962)]. The N number is derived from measured one-third octave band transmission loss data weighted using factors signifying the relative contribution to the articulation index. When the N number is summed with factors for source room floor area, source room speech use, measured adjacent room background noise rating, and the privacy requirement, the N number correlated subjective reactions observed in case studies better than average wall transmission loss alone. Owens Corning, the sponsor of this research, published the N number along with sound transmission class (STC) for several years. With the emergence of regulation of speech privacy in health care facilities, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), it seemed reasonable to revisit the N number. This paper will review the N number methodology and compare some building partition STCs and N numbers, with special attention on the impact of cavity insulation.

High-Stakes Testing and Student Achievement: Does Accountability Pressure Increase Student Learning?

This study examined the relationship between high-stakes testing pressure and student achievement across 25 states. Standardized portfolios were created for each study state. Each portfolio contained a range of documents that told the “story” of accountability implementation and impact in that state. Using the “law of comparative judgments,” over 300 graduate-level education students reviewed one pair of portfolios and made independent evaluations as to which of the two states’ portfolios reflected a greater degree of accountability pressure. Participants’ judgments yielded a matrix that was converted into a single rating system that arranged all 25 states on a continuum of accountability “pressure” from high to low. Using this accountability pressure rating we conducted a series of regression and correlation analyses. We found no relationship between earlier pressure and later cohort achievement for math at the fourth- and eighth-grade levels on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. Further, no relationship was found between testing pressure and reading achievement on the National Assessment of Education Progress tests at any grade level or for any ethnic student subgroup. Data do suggest, however, that a case could be made for a causal relationship between high-stakes testing pressure and subsequent achievement on the national assessment tests—but only for fourth grade, non-cohort achievement and for some ethnic subgroups. Implications and directions for future studies are discussed.

Insertion loss class—Enhancing the single number rating system for duct silencers

Single number rating systems have been used successfully to select architectural acoustics products for many years. Recently a single number rating system was proposed to evaluate sound attenuators in HVAC applications. The proposed system does not include the very low frequencies. This paper discusses the addition of the 31 Hz octave band to the proposed standard contour for calculating insertion loss class (ILC). A number of examples are shown using actual published silencer test data how the system can be applied to common HVAC noise problems.

Integration of the Motor Carrier Safety Status Measurement System into the Roadside Inspection Selection System

The roadside Inspection Selection System (ISS) was developed in response to a 1995 congressional mandate that called for the use of prior carrier safety data to guide the selection of commercial vehicles and drivers for roadside inspections. The program was developed in part by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) of the U.S. Department of Transportation. As ISS has developed, FMCSA’s Performance and Registration Information Systems Management (PRISM) program has also been evolving. One objective of PRISM is to identify relatively unsafe carriers by assigning Safety Status Measurement System (SafeStat) scores and also encouraging those drivers to improve their safety performance or risk losing registration privileges. SafeStat was designed to prioritize carriers for monitoring and compliance reviews, but ISS was designed to prioritize carriers for roadside inspection. Both algorithms, however, use similar data to define a relatively unsafe carrier. It would be advantageous therefore to have a single uniform rating system for all FMCSA programs. This research briefly describes the PRISM and SafeStar algorithms; discusses the integration of the SafeStat algorithm into ISS; and presents conclusions on the initial testing of the resulting system, ISS-2. An analysis of over 213,000 roadside inspections reveals that ISS-2 is as effective as the original ISS in meeting the goals for which it was designed. It successfully identifies and prioritizes for roadside inspection the vehicles and drivers of carriers with poor prior safety performance, as well as those with few or no previous inspections. In addition, safety inspectors who have tested the system say they are pleased with the new algorithm and its added features.

In Search of an Internationally-Valid Scheme for Scoring Compositions

During the course of preliminary work on a cross-national study of student achievement in written composition (undertaken by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, or I.E.A.), we1 have had to wrestle with many questions, of which the most intractable had seemed to be whether a system of scoring compositions could be applied across languages. Even within a language group such as English, there appears to be a division of opinion as to what aspects of a composition are important in the curriculum and in evaluation. When one spreads the net wider to encompass non-alphabetic languages and quite different rhetorical and literary traditions, the task of finding a single rating system appears insuperable. To confound the task, it appeared that even the methodology for creating such a scoring scheme was lacking. Only three studies appeard to have shed any light on an approach, that of Diederich, French, and Carlton, that of John Carroll, and that of Purves and Rippere.2 The first two of these had used factor analysis, a statistical technique that groups together different judgments of the same object which appear to change in a closely related fashion (such as height and weight). Diederich had found that raters' judgments of freshman compositions produced five factors: quality and development of ideas, organization, style or flavor, wording, and mechanics (which could be further divided into grammar, punctuation, and spelling). Carroll asked for ratings (using over fifty pairs of adjectives) by scholars of professionally written prose passages, and found that the ratings grouped themselves along six continua: good-bad, personal-impersonal, ornamented-plain, abstract-concrete, serioushumorous, and characterizing-narrating. The Purves-Rippere study was based on a content analysis of student compositions and professional essays on literary topics and was the one study that was international in scope. In that analysis there emerged three different criteria for evaluating literary texts: effect on the reader, formal qualities, and scope and significance of the author's vision.